BY THE UNIVERSITY OF LA VERNE FACULTY POLICIES COMMITTEE

At a time when tenure is under attack in the American academy, it is heartening to be able to offer some good news. By a message sent on October 10, 2018, Devorah Lieberman, President of the University of La Verne, announced that, “The Board of Trustees, upon the recommendation of the provost and the Academic and Student Affairs Committee of the board, approved the faculty handbook as voted upon at the September Faculty Assembly. Reviewing and updating the faculty handbook was a major undertaking and, on behalf of the Board of Trustees and the PEC, I extend gratitude to the faculty who worked diligently on this important document.”

What this benign, almost anodyne, statement doesn’t say is how long and hard the faculty had to fight for this first step, how important AAUP policies were in the multi-year process that culminated in the adoption of the new handbook, and how much still remains to be done. Under pressure from the board of trustees that began as far back as 2012, an arduous early drafting process, mostly stalled, was followed by a request, in the spring of 2015, that the AAUP review the document. This request came from the newly-appointed provost, Jonathan Reed, and the chair of the Faculty Senate, and it kick-started the process that ultimately succeeded.

The AAUP response received in September 2015 identified significant discrepancies between those documents and AAUP recommendations. Getting those recommendations and other AAUP policies incorporated into newly-drafted documents, passed through faculty governance, and finally approved by the board, taught the faculty involved a few important lessons. We share them in the hopes that they will encourage faculties elsewhere to gird their loins and undertake similar efforts. Success is possible!

1. Create a broadly representative single-purpose faculty committee … that includes a lawyer.

In a multi-unit academic entity, there needs to be broad representation from various departments, colleges, and so on, on a dedicated committee. It took several “generations” of Faculty Assembly and Faculty Senate leadership to create our Faculty Policies Committee. Having a few Faculty Senators on our ten-member committee proved very valuable in obtaining Faculty Senate support. Because governance rules have a significant legal dimension, the university’s law school rep to the committee was the primary person charged with reading the AAUP letter and recommendations, and incorporating them into first-draft language of new policies. A prior iteration of the committee lacking a lawyer/law professor overlooked several important aspects of the AAUP letter, one reason prior efforts foundered.

2. But … don’t put the lawyer in charge!

A good chair for a Faculty Policies Committee is absolutely crucial. Our chair, Lisa Looney of the La Fetra College of Education, was and is highly organized, and has very well-developed emotional intelligence. Not only does this work require interacting with widely varied constituencies, the same approach is not always effective. The simplest of policy decisions can evoke strong emotions on all sides, and an emotionally intelligent chair can lead through these challenges.

3. Have an institutional historian on the committee.

At ULV, we were fortunate to have a primary drafter of the prior documents, Professor Jason Neidleman, who was also a former faculty representative to the board of trustees and a former senate chair, as a member of the committee. This was helpful in understanding how and why prior documents read as they did, and provided invaluable assistance in some of the more political aspects of the undertaking. If this person can support the efforts for change, it helps avoid the obstacles created by defensiveness or overinvestment or any confusion caused by prior documents or policies.

4. Be patient, be persistent, be organized.

Our governance process required documents with policy changes to pass through a Faculty Senate that meets twice a month, as well as a Faculty Assembly that meets only once a month, in coordination with a Board of Trustees that meets just three times a year. The timing of proposals was therefore critical to not running out of time. The chair of the committee needs to remain constantly aware of these scheduling issues, keep the committee on track and moving forward, and not allow a potentially resistant administration to use procedural delaying tactics to stymie the effort.

5. Rally the faculty, but don’t overload them. Slogans help!

Our Faculty Assembly has about 270 voting members, with a quorum requirement of 35 percent and a recently adopted e-voting system that has increased voter participation. Ensuring that more than one hundred members of the faculty were sufficiently informed to feel comfortable voting for our proposals required regular updates and the ability to explain in a few words the essence of proposed changes. Professional academics may be tempted to withhold documents until they are “perfect.” This is not the right impulse here. Presenting the faculty at large with a thick document revised top to bottom will almost inevitably result in the faculty saying they need time to read, think about, and discuss the contents, and crucial deadlines would pass without action. Sending material piecemeal, in digestible “chunks,” was much more effective.

Conclusion

The most significant changes we made this past year had to do with all processes by which persons with tenure might be terminated—whether for cause, because of university-wide financial exigency, or because of program discontinuance. The actual processes for this, based on AAUP policies, consumed many pages of our new faculty handbook as each of these situations is different, and many details had to be spelled out. We found that the phrase “parallel process” was easy for faculty to understand and support: that just as we have a faculty-driven process in order for someone to be granted tenure, there needed to be a faculty-driven, faculty-involved process should persons with tenure be terminated (and not just a subsequent appeal). “Parallel process” usefully summed this up. Feel free to borrow it!

For us, the next task is to protect our contingent full-time faculty (those not eligible for the protections of tenure, but who carry a substantial part of the teaching load in our institution). We hope to use what we’ve learned this past year to be even more effective in our ongoing efforts to strengthen faculty governance on our campus.

The University of La Verne Faculty Policies Committee consists of professors Lisa Looney, Diane Klein, Matthew Witt, Jason Neidleman, Gail Tang, Christine Broussard, Sean Bernard, Loren Dyck, Jaymi Abusham, and Benjamin Jenkins.